Persons and Potential: Education and Abolition in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain

Abstract

This project analyzes late eighteenth-century education, family literature, and antislavery political tracts to demonstrate the intersection of education and family and abolitionist rhetoric in Britain. This examination pinpoints the cultural centrality of the family and the connection between a capacity for education and moral edification as crucial components of both the milieu that produced abolitionism on a grass-roots level and within the appeals of political leaders. Such rhetoric had implications for justifications of human personhood and for the language of “civilization” found throughout the abolition movement.